****
I crouched down on the pavement and picked up a tiny gray stone with two blotches of black embedded into it. It reminded me of the colors of the hound dog my aunt and uncle used to have, or the pattern on a T-shirt a boy in one of my classes at school wore once that I liked.
Sliding the tiny rock into my pocket, I continued through the walkway between the two houses on my way home from school. I followed the path, picking up a stick somewhere along the way, and tapped it against the fence posts as I walked.
Everything was quiet and serene. Nature felt fresh and undisturbed, just like it did most days in Heaven.
Coming out between the two houses, I walked around the short path, past the two side-by-side trees that had lovers’ names carved into their bark, and out into the field behind my house. Once I’d made it past the old stump that I passed by each day, I closed my eyes and smiled to myself. I let the sun tickle my face as I walked blindly toward my house, knowing my way through the field better than I even knew the sound of my own voice.
Just as I was about to pass by the tree with my tire swing in it, I heard the sound of a dog barking.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
Like magic— like the earth had heard my cries and the sky had known my deepest desires, he was there.
Ancel.
But he looked different— older. Of course he looked older. Years had passed since I’d last seen him, but in my mind he was still the same fourteen-year-old boy whose hair was black like a raven’s feathers.
The years had given him height, whereas they’d left me lacking it. His shoulders were wider, and his arms were longer and defined with muscle, much like the boy in the red T-shirt. But Ancel wasn’t anything at all like the boy in the red T-shirt. Ancel’s hair was the same— shorter, perhaps, and his light eyes looked even paler now than they ever had before. He had the ghosting of hair around his face, again reminding me of the years that had passed since I’d last seen him.
But even now, as I stared at him in bewilderment, wondering how it was I’d come again to this same spot to see this beautiful boy across the field, I was hit with the same magnitude of him that I had been the first time.
An arrow struck straight through my heart, or my entire body was going to implode, because suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t be. All I could do was look over across the tall, greening blades of grass, past the few leaf-barren trees, and stare at him.
He was walking through the field with Daisy at his side. The white T-shirt he wore was tight enough to suck any breath I’d had left in my lungs straight out, and his dark jeans hung just low enough that I could see the black band of his underwear.
If someone would’ve asked me years ago when I’d first laid eyes on Ancel if I thought he could’ve looked any more devastating than he had then, I would’ve said it was impossible.
But I would’ve been wrong.
More than anything in the entirety of the universe, I wanted Ancel to look my way. In my heart, I knew he wouldn’t. I knew to someone like him, I was the grass, the trees, the twigs on the ground, and the leaves falling from the branches.
Ancel would never see me. But I’d assured myself that that was all right, because I could still see him. He was all I saw, even when I closed my eyes.
I watched him fade off into the distance, my heart still racing in the pit of my chest. When he was out of sight, and my eyes burned from forgetting to blink, I turned toward my house and went home.
When I walked in through the kitchen, my mom said something to me that I didn’t hear. I went straight to my room, dropped my bag to the ground, and plopped down on the bed. No was cawing at me. I rolled over onto my side and opened the door to his cage. The moment the door was open, he fluttered his wings to the best of his abilities and hopped from his perch onto the crook of my hand.
“He came back to Heaven, No,” I told my best friend. “The boy with the hair that reminds me of your feathers.”
No stared at me with dark, glassy eyes. I petted him gently, and before long, No was asleep on my chest, and I was following him close behind.